If you want a good cry tonight followed by a full-belly laugh, consider seeing the Peabody Conservatory’s trio of one-act operas — all performed in English.
“The program Opera Potpourri is like an entree with two very good dessert courses,” said Stage Director Roger Brunyate, the Peabody Opera Theatre’s artistic director for the past 28 years. “Riders of the Sea is certainly the headliner of the night.”
Accompanied by a chamber ensemble, “Riders of the Sea,” composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and based on John Millington Synge’s 1904 play, will tell the tragic tale of Maurya, an elderly Irishwoman. After her husband, husband’s father and four of her six sons drown in the sea, she struggles to keep her last two sons alive, out of the water’s reach.
The plot progresses as Maurya and her two daughters receive word that a body washed up on the shore may be Michael, Maurya’s fifth son. Ignoring Maurya’s pleas and ghostly visions, Bartley, her sixth son, leaves to sell a horse to make money for the family and returns as a corpse drowned in the ocean.
“They are all gone now,” she cries. “And there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.”
Delivering the different levels of sorrow is the biggest challenge for Peabody graduate student Jennifer Hamilton, playing Maurya.
“The character starts out broken and frail, having been through a lot, and then finds out her last two sons are killed. It’s very tragic.”
Brunyate says tonight’s operas, performed by undergraduate and graduate students, will delight audiences who “love to see young people exceed exceptions.”
The anxiety-filled moment before the curtain rises is not the time to give student-artists last-minute advice, Brunyate says. “It’s the time to help them focus. It’s the time to calm them down and say, ‘We believe in you, you’ve come a long way. Now’s your time to enjoy it.’”
Although the two-hour show, featuring the light-hearted operas “A Game of Chance” and “Marriage by Lanternlight,” will be sung in English, audiences will still be able to see subtitles, Brunyate said. “We’re actually finding people come to expect the subtitles even for operas written in or translated to English.”
IF YOU GO
Opera Potpourri: Opera in English
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Miriam A. Friedberg Hall, Peabody Institute, 17 E. Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore
Cost: Free
Info: www.peabody.jhu.edu
